Board of Health Operating Procedures Template

Introduction

Jill Moore, Associate Professor of Public Law & Government at the Institute of Government, worked with Chris Hoke, Chief of the Office of Regulatory and Legal Affairs, and Craig Michalak, Accreditation Administrator, to develop a template for operating procedures that could be used by all boards of health.

Operating procedures serve the same roll as bylaws. When the Accreditation Rules were amended, the term operating procedures replaced the term bylaws and operating procedures were deemed a requirement under the amended rules. (Under the original Accreditation Rules, the term bylaws was used and they were optional.)

Governance Benchmark 34, Activity 34.1 states that operating procedures must comply with state laws and Activity 34.2 states that boards are required to review their operating procedures annually. In order to comply with these governance activities, the template was carefully drafted to avoid conflicts with state laws and be in compliance with the accreditation rules. The template for operating procedures accomplishes three objectives:

Addresses the types of operating procedures that are often addressed in bylaws
Meets state law and accreditation standards
Eliminates the need to cite or reference the General Statutes

The common practice in bylaws was to cite or reference the General Statutes. In this template, operating procedure six (Compliance with North Carolina Law) is a provision that requires the health director to maintain a current copy of the relevant statutes. The advantages to adopting the recommended wording are:

boards eliminate the risk of quoting out-of-date statutes or paraphrasing a statute in a way that misinterprets the law;
boards are not misled about the law;
boards are not required to monitor legislation for changes to relevant statutes; and
boards will not be required to promptly amend their operating procedures to reflect the relevant changes in statutes.

The operating procedures template is a Word document that can be adapted to each board of health by simply filling in the blanks (please note that there are several places where boards must supply information that’s specific to the board) and then reviewing it annually for any necessary changes. The template may be found here as a zip file for download. Please feel free to contact Jill Moore (919) 966-8042 or Chris Hoke (919) 707-5006 if you have any questions.